steve pieters: as i was pastoring the metropolitan community church of hartford, connecticut, and in 1981, we began hearing stories of this new gayancer and gay men getting a strange form of pneumonia. when i started getting sick in 1982, they still weren't quite sure what to call it. they hadn't discovered the virus. they could tell my immune system was severely deficient, but i didn't have any of what were then the five defining diseases of aids. well, the most important thing in investigating a new disease outbreak is to determine, in fact, is it really a new disease outbreak? is the disease new? is it occurring with greater frequency? who's affected by it, and where will it go? what are the horizons of the epidemic, if it's an epidemic? so the most important thing for us initially was to construct a case definition for what is now called aids. so it was decided that we would define aids on the basis of certain illnesses that were never seen in normal people that must somehow be part of this epidemic. some of them were these opportunistic infections, some of them were very strange